{I confess I have increasingly burdened Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with writing the lion’s share of The Little Red Blog’s posts. That is a lot to ask of a cat, even one as gifted as Pascal. I promise to do better; to begin with, here is my fair share for today.}
Oh, no: Victor Davis Hanson is upset about a thing—I mean, about another thing—I mean—oh, let’s face it, Victor Davis Hanson is, as always, upset about everything.
Why won’t the Baby Boomers, “the generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited,” get off the nation’s lawn?
The Sixties generation’s new normal is to impeach a president twice, to try him as a private citizen, and to seek to remove him from state ballots.
All that was now characteristic of a generation that learned in the 1960s that if it did not get its way, it would wreck what it could not control. So, it was logical that it sought to pack the court, to end the filibuster, to destroy the Electoral College—and to corrupt the law to achieve political ends. Or as the Sixties generation taught us, “by any means necessary”—an arrogant affirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum that “the ends justify the means.”
Now we are left with a final toxic gift from this generation: the destruction of jurisprudence, a system designed not to easily protect the popular and admired but those often pilloried in the public square, the unorthodox, eccentric, and unliked.
Also, much to their discredit, the Baby Boomers, as Hanson notes, failed to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Where were all the hippies at Normandy, Boomer?
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The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
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I am guessing that Pavlos Papadopoulos, who teaches at Wyoming Catholic College, has no idea that parts, at least, of his tirade against American higher education are reminiscent of the 1962 “Port Huron Statement” that helped jump-start the Sixties’ counterculture mentality:
The last century has seen our constitutional republic largely replaced by a new administrative state. This replacement mirrored, and was midwifed by, a transformation in our dominant institutions of education. The sprawling modern research universities that, since the turn of the 20th century, have created an administrative state at home, sustained an American Empire abroad, and continue to dominate higher education today, were built on radically different foundations than the humble classical liberal arts colleges that taught the citizens and statesmen of the early centuries of American history, through our colonial, founding, and early-republican periods.
The regime-level function of the contemporary university is to catechize and credential managers whose expertise will legitimate their rule of the American people, and the wider world, via the federal bureaucracy and a suite of mega-corporations and non-governmental organizations. The regime-level function of our old classical colleges had been to train elites whose wisdom would prepare them to serve the material and spiritual needs of their communities. Today’s university presupposes, and reinforces, the bureaucracy of an empire and the careful management of subject peoples. Our older colleges presupposed, and reinforced, the civil society and structures of a republic and the moral and political self-government of its citizens.
I commend to Mr. Papadopoulos’ attention this link: The Port Huron Statement (1962) | The American Yawp Reader He might learn that the bureaucratic, research-driven academic “regime” he opposes today is the same “regime” we opposed in the Sixties, before we started camping out on Victor Davis Hanson’s lawn.
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As the Schools Go, So Goes the Nation - TomKlingenstein.com
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Christoph Blumhardt:
Our work must follow two laws. We may not bear grudges against anyone, for the kingdom of God is God’s love for all people. And we must not annoy, scorn, or despise any of the poor as of less value than ourselves. You are yourself a miserable wretch if you treat them as though they were of no value. We must always have God’s values before our eyes. God’s treasure lies within each person, not with the great and powerful of this earth. The divine worth in any despised person must be recognized, and we must protect and cherish it. Whenever we get together with people, we need to consider their value for the kingdom of God.
When history, which confuses us and creates enemies, comes to an end and deception has been driven out of the world, we might see this kingdom, this treasure, shining clearly. In the meantime, I must see it in my enemy as a mustard seed and forgive again and again. If someone should insult me a hundred times, I must still see in him value for God.
This is what people have not yet learned, and I believe that this is why the kingdom of God has not yet come. People bite and scratch, warring against each other, despising and scorning one another. Even the finest people are ready, for the sake of their beliefs and convictions, to judge and condemn others – they have thoroughly learned that! But to discern what is of God in the enemy, to grasp God’s worth in those who insult us, in foreigners, in those far from us who think differently, in the poor just as much as in the noble – this they have not learned.
The above is from a sermon preached by Christoph Blumhardt in 1899. The congregation listened attentively, then went out into the world and, following Blumhardt’s advice, loved their enemies, turned the other cheek, and went out of their way to see the value in everyone. Their efforts were contagious, and, within a miraculously short time, the mustard seed of love had become an entire kingdom. Nations did not make war no more, swords were turned into ploughshares, and everyone got a pony. Honest—that’s what happened; I mean, proleptically.
Fun fact: Blumhardt, a respected Lutheran theologian, declared his support for socialism in 1899, and announced that he had joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was promptly fired from his position as a Lutheran minister.
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How God Sees Us by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (plough.com)
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